IBM apparently wants to take over Instana, a 2015 founded company specializing in performance monitoring with roots in Germany. Instana, with its headquarters in Chicago and a development center based in this country, sells an APM platform (Application Performance Monitoring). Financial details of the proposed acquisition were not disclosed and the transaction is subject to customary closing conditions. It is expected to be completed within a few months.

What can Instana? Instana is designed to enable organizations to manage the performance of cloud-native applications no matter where they are – on mobile devices, in public and private clouds, and on-site, including IBM’s mainframe architecture Z. Instana’s Enterprise Observability Platform apparently automatically builds a contextual understanding of cloud applications and provides insights into IT problems that could harm companies or reduce customer satisfaction, such as slow response times, non-functioning services or a failed infrastructure. For these it probably shows where they can be prevented or remedied.

More specifically, Instana offers transparency via CI / CD pipelines (Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery). It reduces complexity through automated discovery and dependency mapping in the entire hybrid cloud enterprise infrastructure. Established open source technologies such as the Prometheus monitoring tool and the OpenTelemetry observability framework are used for this purpose.

Interlocking with Watson AIOps Apparently the plan is to integrate Instana into Watson AIOps from IBM. The insights gained in this way are intended to lead to AI-supported alerts should an application deviate from the norm before it can have a negative impact on a transaction or activity.

IBM has used different channels for Takeover expressed, on the one hand in a press release, on the other hand in a more detailed blog post. Mirko Novakovic, CEO of Instana and former head of the German IT service provider codecentric, from which Instana emerged, has also signed up for the acquisition. He also goes a little bit into the previous development of the future Big Blue daughter.

(ane)